Be A Player
Posted by Carachan on March 24, 2010 | Permalink
Can we all stick to ogling the Evangelion babes for free? (Taken at last year’s Tokyo Game Show).
You might have to blame Mr Tim Rogers’ influence at Kotaku for today’s long rant. His disposition has infected me. But it’ll be an interesting read because I have never posted an article in the midst of this kind of bloodlust. Get out of my way! I have something to shout at you.
I haven’t met many maladjusted gamers. In fact, they seem particularly well adjusted. They work in every profession and are some of the kindest, funniest , most outgoing people I’ve ever hung out with. My own gaming friends, for example, who accompanied me on my liberal coffee-drenched way through university, are now doctors, lawyers, network administrators, writers, secondary school teachers; one guy works for the government in some sort of James Bond job that I’m pretty sure he’s not allowed to talk about, one for Google, others I know are dotted around the world. Some of them went into the videogame industry, which, I should point out, also takes incredible smarts, smarts technologically and creatively (which they’re now handing out BAFTAs for). These people are you and me. These people are people we see every day in the pub or at work. I am one of these people too. You can’t mistake us. We are intelligent, normal people.
Imagine then, my disgust, at every time it is implied that someone who plays videogames is a social recluse, someone with no social skills, someone who is unattractive or somehow socially inferior. It’s not always directly implied; sometimes it is very subtly but cuttingly indirectly implied. It can be seen in some the faces of the older generation, for example, when I tell them that I work /worked for a videogame company.
“Isn’t it full of nerds?” they ask, looking in amusement at me, like they are bringing me in on the joke.
For the sake of politeness, I take it with a smile and a laugh, but this is not the sort of reaction you’d get from the same person if you told them you worked in other avenues of media.
“Do I look like a nerd?” I ask.
“Of course not,” they say. “You look normal.”
This answer always gets me. (Not least because I am a stunning beauty.)
I then go on to explain, attempting to be sarcasm-free, that there are quite a lot of “normal” people who make games and play them. In fact games companies are almost entirely populated with these “normal” people. I explain that games make more revenue than their beloved Hollywood (which, too, had to fight to get its artistic recognition). That gamers are now on average thirty years old with a mortgage and well-adjusted, Viva Pinata-playing kids. I often get a blank look, or a smirk, as if to say, “Talk as much as you like, love, I don’t believe you. Game companies are full of social recluses and spotty geeks.”
When I go out of my way to explain that I too, play games, there is another reaction that goes on that I sometimes get from my fellow sisterhood, especially from mothers, which never fails to make me feel disappointed in my ovaries’ inability to control my unruly temperament.
“That’s horrible,” they say. “How can you play games when they’re so violent?”
There is always a definite undertone of but you’re a girl going on here. A kind of weird you are the lifegiver thing with a gesture towards my biology. As if my maternal instinct is anulled by my interest in war games or adventure stories. There is the assumption that by virtue of being female, I am somehow better than men, that I would have a better, more moral stance than men. That I would have better “standards“ on my entertainment. How insulting it would be to my male friends if someone suggested I had a better moral compass than them just because of my femininity.
Then, when I ask them if they’ve ever seen a war movie they reply in the positive – without a hint of irony. “But I wouldn’t watch it with my children around.” Brushing aside the touchy subject / assumptions that people make about videogames and violence – surprisingly I too, do not look at violent images with a kid in the room, would never give the controller away willingly to one, would never buy an 18 rated game for a kid. I don’t know a male my age who would either. And I play a variety of videogames, thank you very much. There are “genres”. And violent videogames make up a very small part of those genres.
Personally, I’m fed up of people stereotyping what I can and cannot do, and stereotyping male gamers as soap-dodging reclusive freaks, when they clearly are as awesome, and as goddamn “normal” as I am, as much as anyone can be normal. The assumption, too, that games make us violent is completely unproven. I played Grand Theft Auto through my formative years, and there’s nothing I’ve done in my life that would make anyone think I was maladjusted, socially reclusive, or for want of a better word, a mental. And I cannot stand people looking at men who play videogames as being so either. Give us ten to twenty years, dudes, we’ll all be running your social security with the compassion it is due. This goes for you too, Titchmarsh. …Grudgingly.
I’m not entirely absolved of blame. By virtue of engaging these stereotypes, I am legitimising them, forming them, making them malleable. There are no pretenses behind the name “Game Fatale”; the irony is not lost – we are engaging these age-old stereotypes for exploitation, getting our own back almost, on a label that has become cliché. I personally also have a kind of “take the word back” relationship with the word “geek” (Weezer are freaking cool geek chic and I’ll throw a rum/coke at anyone who says otherwise); but how else are we supposed to look at these labels if not the way the world constantly pushes them at us? I have no specific beef with the word “geek” itself, just the implications it has in tone when applied by some people, which we can change. If you apply the word “geek” to a girl, it is different to if you’d done it to a guy. Why? Why is being a girl geek ever so slightly “cooler” than a guy geek? Is it because girl geeks are sexualised and fetishised? Yes. And is it because guy geeks are ridiculed? Yes. Fuckin’ A! Both stereotypes are sexist; I’m mad as hell and I can’t stand it any more.
This brings me to the real reason I am writing about this. The trigger, if you will. These gamer stereotypes are so intensely ingrained into society these days that you can even make money from them.
Please look at this – it’s Kotaku’s report on the site called Game Crush. I couldn’t link you at the time of posting to the site, because it was so bombarded with hits that it went down a few hours ago. But I saw it. And it was a headache on a page.
There are three assumptions that this system works on. Firstly, that in order to get to play against a girl online, you have to pay one. Secondly, there is the assumption that male gamers cannot talk to a girl without doing it through videogames. Thirdly, there is the assumption that one of the reasons that people go online to game is to pick up chicks. Or that they wished that were possible.
Look. There are plenty of us girls out there playing games. As Matt Hickey at Crave says, rather getting to the point, “any real gaming girl would set her profile to “Hurty” and kick your ass” (his emphasis). The reason we all game is for enjoyment. We have fun doing it. You don’t have to pay us to be there. Girls actively pay Xbox Live so that they can game. There should be no other reason a girl logs in other than to play the actual game. I’ll get back to this later.
Second: As I have just mentioned, I do not know one male gamer who is this sad, lonely stereotype that Game Crush seems to assume is out there. This is sexist and stupid. It makes me angry. It should make you angry. I think the main demonstration that this stereotype doesn’t exist is the huge sense of bewilderment going on at the Kotaku message boards. The guys there are puzzled and insulted, the girls there think it’s a joke. Gamers who are boyfriend and girlfriend are on there illustrating the total lack of need for any kind of gamer prostitution. It’s humiliating for us all.
Thirdly, though I guess sex and the internet will always be linked, you have to wonder at people who want to hurl sexual absurdity over the internet at each other during a videogame. Personally, if I were forced to ever solicit someone over the internet, having to do it during a frenetic game of Halo would be the most distracting thing in the world. I’d rather get the Master Chief to corpse hump my opponent’s dead virtual body than bother trying to show my boobs to him over the internet. What self respecting gamer would use up the screen space anyway?
This brings me to my main point – these girl gamers at Game Crush? If they really liked (or were good at) games, wouldn’t they just be gaming for free? Yeah but, you can make money from it. Sure – and it’s cool while it’s their choice. But they are fetishizing the real girl gamers, and they are exploiting the hell out of men.
Let’s drop the illusions. As a woman who plays games, I am not your entertainment. I am not here for you to look at. I am not here for you to attempt to flirt with. I am here to win, to lose, or to get all your bases to belong to us. If you are here to flirt, you are going to get your distracted ass kicked. Because this is a gaming arena. It is not a bar or a club or the pulled-back seats of your Camaro.
The most insulting thing about the service that these girls provide is that it is purely a pretence. They are attractive women who uphold a pretence that they like to play videogames. If you have to pay them, then it is not a real “like”. It is a transaction. They pretend at pleasure from games, and from talking in this manner. For this reason, you will never get these women into bed, and you will never be satisfied from interaction this way. It’s like going to a strip club: they pretend they are aroused, but really, they are not. If you want to pay for this hollow interaction, feel free, I guess.
Alternatively, find yourself a girl who genuinely does want to play games, who gets a real kick out of playing them, whom you are attracted to, and she is attracted to you. Because that is why you find girls who play games attractive. Because they have something in common with you. Then, when you find her, put the games aside and do something far more fun than exclaiming at a fuzzy image U R SO HOT LOL THIS IS AEWSUM. It would save money, anyway.
PS http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/20030526
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